"Martha Wells - Wheel of the Infinite" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells Martha)

She took his arm and wiped the blood away. She felt him react to the contact, just a slight start,
perhaps because her hands were cold. His skin was very warm and she was more aware of the
pulsebeat in his wrist than she should be. She noticed he was clean, or at least not more filthy than she
was from long days of travel, then remembered the midnight swim in the baray. That didn’t help her
concentration any.
She was uncomfortably aware that the last time she had been this close to a man had been two
months ago when she had helped hold Rastim’s son down so Old Mali could lance his boil. Before that...
Well, she wasn’t going to add up the days, but it had been a long time.
He had said nothing, and under the pressure of that silence, she found herself saying, “What’s your
name?”
His eyes flicked up to meet hers. Green flecked with gold. “Rian.”
Caught unprepared by his willingness to give up that information so readily, she stared at him and he
grinned at her, obviously conscious of having surprised her. Again. Inwardly cursing her susceptibility, she
said, “Is that all? No family, no clan?” If she was remembering rightly, the Sitanese took the name of their
local lord for a family name.
He turned his head and she noticed his right earlobe had the marks of at least four piercings for
ornaments; she knew the Sitanese denoted rank in their warrior caste with ear studs, but she didn’t know
what the number signified, if anything. He had laid the sheathed siri next to him on the bench. She had
thought it without ornament, but this close she could see the ring and the hilt bore deep marks and
gashes— not signs of use, but places where stones or figured metal had been removed. Had he sold
everything valuable during his long journey, carefully removed any mark of rank before he left? Maybe
both, she thought. He was wearing an amulet around his neck, next to his skin. She knew it must be
important to him, since he had sold or otherwise gotten rid of any other ornament. It was a small disk of
fine white stone on a faded blue cord, inlaid with lapis in a runic figure. That doesn’t tell you much, she
thought in wry self-disgust. Your education in the customs of lands outside the Empire might have
been just a little better. But then she had never expected to have to wander them. He said, “Things are
less complicated in the Sintane.”
“If the Sintane is so much better, why are you here?”
“I didn’t say it was better, just less complicated.”
 When she released his arm the warmth of his skin seemed to cling to her fingers. She took a tana leaf
from the wrapped bundle under the salve jar. He watched with a somewhat bemused expression as she
worked the sweet-smelling salve into the leaf. “You don’t want to know my name?” she asked.
“I know your name. You’re Maskelle.”
For an instant, she felt cold. “How do you know that?”
Instead of betraying any guilt, he gave her that look she was beginning to be accustomed to, the what
is wrong with your wits look, and explained, mock patiently, “You answer to it when the others yell it at
you.”
“Oh.” Idiot, she told herself. “The others are the Corriaden Travelling Grand Theatrical, from Ariad.”
“But you’re from Duvalpore.”
“Yes.” She took his arm again and laid the leaf along the cut, then bound it in place with a clean strip
of cloth. She had to grit her teeth to hold back the impulse to explain that the tana had healing properties
too; his opinion that she didn’t know what she was doing was as palpable as the dampness in the air. It
had to be intentional.
He looked at her staff. “What’s a Voice of the Ancestors doing on the Great Road with a travelling
Ariaden puppet show?”
“It’s not a puppet show.”
He looked up at the puppets suspended from the wagon’s ceiling, one eyebrow lifted in eloquent
comment. “It’s not an ordinary puppet show,” she explained, tying off the bandage and aware she
sounded like a fool. And that they had somewhat strayed from the subject at hand.
She looked at him. He looked back, still with that same air of ironic comment. He wasn’t afraid of her